New Accenture MD is not your typical consultant

Accenture managing director Michelle Grujin is the first to admit she's not your typical consultant.

Instead of an MBA from a prestigious business school, or a background in accounting or audit, Ms Grujin, who runs Accenture's Australian retail practice, has two decades of hands-on retail experience.

She started on the shop floor at Country Road 20 years ago, joined Myer during the Dawn Robertson era, and enjoyed stints at niche brands such as Bardot, Lee Rider and Elwood before moving across to Pacific Brands, where she led an initiative to reduce lead times in apparel sourcing.

"H&M and Zara were disrupting the youth market and I became interested in the supply chain," Ms Grujin said.

"At the core they were running an efficient and effective supply chain to tap into customer demand – I focused on what I would do differently ... how to collaborate with [suppliers] to replenish to demand."

After three years at PacBrands, Ms Grujin joined Billabong in 2012, a year before a $350 million debt and equity refinancing.

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Working with chief executive Launa Inman and her successor, Neil Fiske, Ms Grujin overhauled Billabong's supply chain, commuting between Irvine, California and her home in Melbourne, where her daughter was studying for her VCE.

After returning to Australia in 2015, Ms Grujin explored a few opportunities in retail before joining Accenture, which had consulted to Billabong during the turnaround.

"Our values were aligned and I was given the autonomy to truly rethink what our retail proposition is in this market," said Ms Grujin, who was promoted to managing director last November.

"We've gone back to being a vertical organisation instead of horizontal – we're going back to our true industry focus."

Ms Grujin is using her merchandising and supply chain experience to help retailers navigate structural changes in retail, such as the shift to online and the expansion of global chains such as Zara and H&M, and behavioural changes among consumers.

Millennial shoppers are becoming increasingly concerned about sustainability, ethical sourcing and authenticity – "nine out of 10 are most likely to shop with a brand that presents an affiliation to a social issue that’s important to them," she said.

"The circular economy, provenance and sustainability are on everyone's agendas."

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Retailers hoping to earn and maintain the trust of consumers needed the right tools, she said, whether they were sourcing and selling chilled foods or cashmere sweaters.

New technologies that promise to help retailers transform their supply chains and make them more transparent include blockchain, video analytics, radio frequency identification tags and artificial intelligence.

Ms Grujin said the ability to track and trace products through the supply chain, without adding time and costs, was becoming more critical as global retailers took market share, shopping shifted online and consumers demanded more transparency.

"Technology such as blockchain allows consumers to interact more directly with products – it becomes more of a dialogue than a monologue," she said.

Few Australian retailers have launched pilots or programs using blockchain, digital ledgers that record and verify transactions across networks, enabling companies to prove provenance, tampering and control mechanisms.

Australian agri-tech start-up Escavox is using a blockchain-based technology platform to reduce food waste for companies by tracking and planning the way chilled produce is transported around the country.

Retailers such as Myer are testing the use of RFID tags to track goods through the supply chain, from the factory floor to the till, improve the speed and accuracy of stocktakes and inventory, and reduce markdowns and theft.

Ms Grujin said many Australian retailers and consumer goods companies were waiting for the cost of these technologies to come down and for the benefits to be proved.

"The value for retailers is in not being an early adopter, more a fast follower," she said. "As these technologies become a lot more mature analytics will play a more important role."

Another major issue confronting retailers was the future of work and the skills needed by their employees as technology replaced manual tasks.

According to a recent Accenture study, 87 per cent of organisations say they do not have a plan to help their workforce adapt to change.

"For example for something as simple as item registration, if you're able to automate a big part of that activity and improve accuracy and speed of execution what do we want our people to be doing and what are the capabilities we need to reskill them on?" Ms Grujin said.